Will Farming Be Possible in the Future + Dogma-Free Gardening

And nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your Daily Dose of Ecological

Farming. Insight. It is Friday, March 27th, 2026. And today, we are talking about farmland,

what's left of it at least, the dogma free garden, and a little about AI because it's Friday

and why not. So let's do it.

All right. Happy Friday everyone. I hope you all are doing well and feeling well. Obviously,

where I would typically do a feedback Friday show, we are holding off until I fully get my

voice back in all its weird glory. My hope crossing my fingers is that next week I can start

back on full episodes, but I'm not going to try and push that too hard. If it's too difficult

on my voice, then I'll just stop. This show is important to myself and the people it helps

employees. So I think not ruining my voice should probably be a priority, so we will hybrid it

up again today. And if I can pull it off, we will go to full episodes on Monday. Again,

cross those fingers. Anyway, how is the week treating you all so far? I got my dry land rice

seeds yesterday, so I'm excited to embark on that little adventure. If for no other reason,

then just to have some experience with dry land rice when people ask about it, I think I'll

likely get those started today. Although the temperatures are supposed to just keep dropping.

It was like 80 something degrees yesterday and we have a freeze warning for tonight. So that's fun.

After this quite cold weekend, I'll get the sweet potato started and bends and get them slipping.

I forgot to mention that in yesterday's April and the market garden episode and probably a

million other things. And don't forget to continue to send your 22nd farm video clips to farm

or make it noteworth.com. Always love to see those. Just upload it to Google Drive or Dropbox and

send that to Mike, you all rock. All right. So the tricky thing about farming is that you kind of

need land to do it. For the last like several decades, we have seen a massive consolidation in

farmland from the hands of families and small businesses into large corporations. We have lost

millions of acres of arable land to out of control development. And as a result, supply and demand,

land prices have gone absolutely bananas. The current punctuation mark, more like an ellipsis,

I guess is the data center boom, which itself is gobbling up farmland and power and water. But

prices remain absolutely ludicrous. My own farm that we bought like in 2020 has doubled in value

if not tripled with the infrastructure in six years. There is nothing sustainable about that if

you want farms to exist in the future. And when you couple all of those costs with economic

factors such as gas prices from thoughtless wars, then you get an utterly untenable situation.

In effect, farms and farmers disappear. So let's put some numbers to this. At 2024, land value

study from the USDA found that cropland prices have risen from $2,700 and 2010 to $5,570 per acre

in 2024. In case you already haven't done that math, that's a 106.29% increase more than double.

At that pace, can we expect another doubling in 14 years? More,

uh, went up 4% from 23 to 24. So, uh, yeah, it looks probable that we will again see it double.

But what does not look probable is that people interested in farming in the future will suddenly

have doubled the money. I would guess it is more likely the opposite of the way that we are going.

And there are people interested in farming. Those people exist. There are lots of them. But the

barrier to entry is profound. Brooks Lamb of the American Farmland Trust wrote a good

guest essay for the New York Times recently called Why the Kids Won't Farm, in which he writes,

quote, the biggest barrier to entry for next generation farmers isn't knowledge or training or

work ethic. It's the historically high price of farmland. Young people need an agricultural

economy that makes it easier for them to farm. They need viable, consistent markets for high quality

local products. And most important, they need affordable land. And quote, indeed, it isn't that

people have no desire to farm. It's that they increasingly just have no farmland on which to do it.

They just can't. I don't study policy. I'm not in the habit of suggesting specific policies. But

this needs some dang policies or there is no farmland in the future. Heck, there's barely

farmland now. Vegetable farming is mildly achievable because it can be done on such small acreage.

But if I was in aspiring, you know, young nerd interested in starting a grain farming operation

and I'm not saying I'm not, I would need what? Like a million dollars to get going more to feed

people with food that will never really be able to recoup that cost. I need to be wealthy. That

makes sense. You can buy and flip a lot of things in this world for profit. But we need to dramatically

reconsider how to regulate that with farmland. We desperately need to rethink urbanization and

sprawl data centers. We definitely need to rethink those, which presumes we've thought about them

once, I guess. When I was in Frankfurt in our state capital this week, I made sure to emphasize

that data centers are giant buildings that beyond their energy consumption and water pollution

require hundreds and sometimes thousands of acres of farmland that will effectively be on forever.

Non-recoverable poof. At a time with minimal accessible farmland, we are converting it into

something that can never be farmland again, so that we can get more detailed Google responses and

generate pictures of random stuff. That cool. Perfect. Farmers need financial incentives so

as not to be tempted to sell off their farmland for retirement and put that land in land trusts,

aspiring farmers need more help accessing the land that already exists. There are people working

on this. Like, for instance, the American farmland trust whom the author mentioned above works for,

but they need more money. These ideas need more support. I know there are a million and one

things drawing all of our attention right now, but I just can't help but feel like protecting farmland

is one we can affect. And it's definitely one we will not regret protecting can actually be done.

Like truly we could do it. Anyway, let me know what you all think. Fear, hope. I like hope. We

should do a little hope sometimes. Otherwise, I'm feeling a lot more confident in my voice for next

week. So in theory, we will be back to regularly scheduled programming on Monday. Until then,

enjoy a couple more Farmer Jesse Friday rants from past shows for the next two segments,

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All right, back to the show. All right, so at the start of this week, I talked about the

principles of soil health. Keep in the soil covered as much as possible, planted as much as possible,

and disturbing it as little as you possibly can in your context. There is, of course,

a hidden principle within all of those three principles, which is to say, grow without dogma,

represented with as possible. When we first started no till growers, people would often say things

like if you were planting a crop in the ground, it's tillage, or if you're brought for working in

soil, it's harming the some soil life, so that can't possibly be no till. But one thing we have

long maintained is no tillage is not the starting point, or at least not always. No till is the ultimate

goal, right? No till is a philosophy of doing less, of causing less harm, of actively improving the soil,

and sometimes along the way, it's going to require some soil work and it definitely requires putting

plants in the ground. However, no two farms can and will go about this the exact same way. Farming

and gardening is a relationship business. In the same way, one partner cannot just hoist upon

another partner what they want without first asking what the other person wants from the

relationship. The grower must listen to what their soil needs and not just bring their own

unshakable idealisms to the soil. Moreover, what my soil needs here in Kentucky's own 6B is going

to be different from what a sandy soil needs, a tropical soil, a prairie soil, and so on. So two will

my tool access be different, and the crops that I want to grow will be unique to my market.

The materials I have that I can cover my soil with will not only be specific to my region,

by and large, but at a different cost in different quantities with different levels of quality.

All of that is simply to emphasize that we cover the soil, plant the soil, and we're gentle with

our disturbance as much as possible because success with growing food is not going to come from

one's own view of what is a perfect farm, but rather one's ability to build a relationship with

that farm. So do these things as much as possible as you can in your context and don't compare what

you are doing or how little or much you're doing to others or think of any requisite disturbance

as a failure if it's moving you closer to a healthier farm. It's not about being a tillage

farmer or no tillage farm, it's about being a steward. Being dogmatic about what a farm

should be is not stewardship, it's performance. So indeed, don't bring your own strict ideas to the

farm, make it more collaborative, let the farm create the ideas with you, and I think we will let

you all say the rest in the comments. Today's episode is brought to you by Good Agriculture.

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farm, they help the business learn more at goodagriculture.com slash info. That's goodagriculture.com slash

info. All right, back to the show. All right, our final Patreon question today comes to us from

Mirian Cantaloupe, who writes, quote, hey, Jesse, very much related to what you said about chefs

using AI to create imaginary menus instead of asking young chefs to come up with innovative ideas

based on a set of prompts. I'm a musician and educator who teaches children, but also young

teachers. It blows my mind that edu influencers and edu companies peddling AI are pushing teachers

to just use AI to create lesson plans, create slide decks, etc. A shortcut to filling students'

heads with misinformation, and they say parenthetically, IMO, in my opinion, and cutting out one of the

most rewarding parts of being an educator, planning what you're going to do with students every day,

not worth the environmental costs, and quote, all right, so I can't speak to the education sector

of the world in their use of AI, and teachers have a really hard job, an increasingly hard job.

But my concerns about AI and just the sheer lack of regulation and thought around it in terms of

what people should and should not be using it for has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

Environmentally, AI uses multiple times more electricity and water compared to a classic Google

search, 10 to 30 times more Google itself tells me. Quoting an MIT news article on the subject,

quote, the power needed to train in a deploy a model like OpenAI's GPT-3 is difficult to ascertain

in a 2021 research paper, scientists from Google and the University of California at Berkeley,

estimated the training process alone consumed 1287 megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power

about 120 average US homes for a year, generating about 552 tons of carbon dioxide.

In terms of water, water is needed to both cool the servers, which are used, which they themselves

generated significant amount of heat, and also in many cases to cool nuclear plants or perhaps

the evaporation from hydroelectric plants used to make the additional electricity the servers

are using. So effectively, depending on the data centers, the conditions that day and the searches

and the power source, a handful of searches cost something like a bottle of water.

And those bottles add up when you are talking hundreds of millions of users. Now,

these data centers and AI models are likely to become more and more efficient, but I was introduced

to an economic phenomenon recently, which makes me feel worse about that, not hopeful.

It's called the Jevons Paradox, where essentially more efficiency can lead to more use of a

resource and not less of it. Now, it's not a bulletproof concept, but basically back in the later

1800s, William Stanley Jevons recognized that more efficient steam engines led to a higher

coal consumption, rather than less of it, i.e., rather than the conservation of coal it meant we

used more coal, because we added more efficient engines. Basically, like it was with cars,

as engines became more efficient, people didn't travel less, they traveled more and further.

So, gas and coal usage effectively increased, or at least returned to pre-efficiency levels,

or even when the cars are more efficient and the energy used in a lifetime is actually less.

If the efficiency leads to lower costs or cost savings, the family may buy a second car and

drive more, thus leading to greater usage of that resource. And so, we returned to the paradox.

To be clear, there are improvements in efficiency that do lead to energy savings, but there are

others, like perhaps with refrigeration, where people now buy more refrigerators, and then more food

leading to more food waste. So, it's not in cut and dry this paradox, but it is interesting.

And in researching this segment, I found out that AI people really love the Jevons Paradox,

because they seem to amusingly misunderstand it. Microsoft CEO, for instance, wrote on social media

quote, Jevons Paradox strikes again, as AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see it's

use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity, we just can't get enough of. Well, yes, that will happen,

but also the point of the paradox is that with the increased usage of the tool, in this case AI,

we'll come with the increased usage of all the energy and water, we don't have enough of.

The paradox isn't about if efficiency will make the tool more accessible and easier to use.

The paradox is about the fuel, in this case, electricity and water and the loss of carbon,

used to run said tool, gains in efficiency will lead to more use of the tool, thus the fuel.

To me, frankly, AI needs some very swift and very profound regulation established, or we are

careening towards environmental catastrophe, and not to mention social disasters as people,

I don't know, lose the ability to do basically anything for themselves. If I'm allowed my

grumpy old man moment, I believe that large language models have a place in science, research,

medicine, astronomy, those sorts of things, areas where crunching massive data sets can help lead

to, for instance, earlier cancer detection, or finding potentially dangerous asteroids or the

better security, whatever. It should not be used to name a few for art, music, writing papers,

literature, Google searches, or basically anything for the average person. We do not need

generative AI or large language models open to the public. We cannot use it responsibly. It's a

massive copyright infringement, and it's going to gravely complicate the future for our children,

environmentally, and just in their problem-solving skills. I was listening to a podcast the other

day about how frustrated a climate scientist was, because anytime they want to even test it,

slightly new idea or technology it requires innumerable meetings and ethics, conversations,

and research into possible concerns about the test itself, and then AI slash large language

models, and so on. That was all just a bunch of dudes in Silicon Valley releasing a massive

environmental and social problem onto the planet with absolutely no real oversight. That is

frustrating. We protect and encourage those who do the worst things for our health and the

health of our planet, and we stifle basically anyone else who tries to help. This is going to be a

hard thing to explain to our children. Now, do teachers deserve and probably need more assistance

with their lesson plans and such? Almost certainly. But also, there are going to be tens of

billions of people put out of work by various AI programs, so maybe some of the taxes we put on

those companies who get rid of their workers for AI programs, also part of my regulatory suggestions,

can go to paying teachers more and supplying them with more help for their lesson plans. Just an

idea. Anyway, hope it was a question.

All right, I hope you all enjoyed that hybrid compilation episode. Really appreciate your

patients on the voice as always. Don't forget, noteworthy is a non-profit 501C3,

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Pick up a hat or a copy of my book, the living soul handbookingnotogors.com to support our work.

Big, big thank you to everyone over at patreon.com-slash-notogors-where. At a certain level,

or if you just bump up from one level to another, you sign up in the month of March,

you get a shout out on the show. But we're going to hold off on shout-outs one more time,

and in the stories and all those things, until I can do a full-blown episode. So stay tuned for that,

and thank you all again for your patients. Much love, see you one day. That'll be great. TGIM. Bye.